Leading market, business, social and technical indicators point to the growing importance of digitally recorded content. In 2003, media data, such as images, motion pictures, voice, audio, and video, eclipsed structured data in sheer volume.
One of the key problems with media data is transferring the often huge files through a network. Normally, a large file is transferred so that the complete content is transferred before anything is done with the data. A prominent implementation of this paradigm is the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the standard way to transfer files throughout the World Wide Web.
FTP is a commonly used protocol for exchanging files over any network that supports TCP/IP. FTP is most commonly used to download a file from a server using the Internet or to upload a file to a server for example, uploading a Web page file to a server. With the manual transportation & delivery cost of physical media, such as tape, being high, conventional FTP is increasingly being used to achieve the same for media data, such as images, motion pictures, voice, audio, and video over the available computer networks due to its low cost.
Conventional FTP works well if the size of the file to be transferred is comparatively small. But when very large files need to be transferred using FTP, it can take long time to transfer the file.